Das Verbotene Wort

Sacrifice - Sinead O’Connor (mp3)
What Do You Want Me To Say? - The Dismemberment Plan (mp3)

A plague o' both your houses! -- Mercutio

America has forgotten what it means to sacrifice.

We think sacrifice is having to delay our retirement.
We think sacrifice is having to pay more for our own health insurance,
or to pay higher taxes,
or to get less welfare,
or to have your pension plan reduced,
or to lose a few million in a stock nosedive,
or to avoid maxing out another credit card.

Sacrifice used to mean something.

It used to mean a devoted man placing his young son on an altar and preparing to slaughter him merely because his deity demanded it of him. Or dropping everything -- every single thing -- to follow some wild-eyed long-haired Nazarene.

It used to mean a willingness to put one’s life at death’s finicky door in the support of what our country meant. From the earliest days of our country, men and eventually women willing to lose years of their young lives, possibly body parts, possibly their entire existences, for the noble cause of keeping some weird thing called The American Dream “alive.” Yes, they were willing to die for some dream other people can have. Not even real stuff. Just a dream. Just a silly ideal.

Only 11 years before I was born, an American President actually had the gall, the unmitigated gall, to tell his people they should ask not what their country could do for them, but rather, what they could do for their country. That poor man would never get elected today. He wouldn’t even get past Iowa straw polls.

Sacrifice as a real thing, as something with actual weight and import, is dead in America, and I’m not sure it can be revived.

Not to say all of us have lost it. Latino men who sneak across the border, who work for below-standard wages, who live in ramshackle hotels with three other men so that they can send a large portion of their meager earnings back to wives, children, families. These men know sacrifice. Naturally, we don’t as a society approve of them being here. They piss us off.

Soldiers still know sacrifice, although most of them have little sense of what they’ve offered until they’ve had to offer it, until they realize whatever has been sacrificed is gone forever.

The more politically engaged and opinionated you are, the more likely you’ve forgotten the meaning of sacrifice. Because I haven’t heard one politician talk about it. They can’t. They won’t get elected.

Sure, they might say the word, “sacrifice,” in stump speeches about taxes and entitlement programs and unemployment and crap. But they use “sacrifice” in the same way we use “annihilation” when we talk about football games that are 28-0.

When George Bush had the world’s sympathy and the country’s desperate ear, he could have warned us, begged us to prepare for sacrifice in light of 9/11, but instead he told us to go shopping.

Obama’s first approach to our frightening recession was to ask no one to sacrifice anything, but merely to generate higher spending levels so that everyone, rich and poor, could be numbed, so any chance of having to sacrifice anything substantial might be avoided at all costs.

I don't blame them. These men avoided making us sacrifice anything because we won’t dare allow them4. We would hate them forever. We might even do them harm.

It’s not just Presidents. Our Congressmen and -women, our Senators, they only talk about sacrifice when it’s about the people not voting for them. Democrats demand that the rich step up and make sacrifices good for the country by paying higher taxes. Republicans demand that the poor stop expecting freebies and sacrifice these “entitlements” as notions that we can no longer afford.

No one tells the people in their tents to sacrifice a damn thing. It’s all about what that other guy isn’t sacrificing that holds us all back.

We have become a nation of coddled, spoiled brats.

And I’m one of them. You need only see my reaction when my iPod freezes up a second time in a day, or when my chance to see the Foo Fighters in concert gets waylaid by professional obligations. I’m as pathetic as the rest of you. We suck, and we do it as one big whiny collective.

But here’s the hard truth. We either figure out a way to better grasp what real sacrifice is, and what it means, and what it requires of us, or the world will come and cash that check for us. It will force us to sacrifice things, and we won’t get to choose.

This has already begun, in small ways, during this recession, but it’s only going to get worse. If we can’t right our own ship, we’re going to get annihilated in ways that will make us wish we were still sitting around making fun of the Detroit Lions.

And hey, Ayn Rand, if you’re somewhere reading this, go fuck yourself. Preferably not in any way you would remotely enjoy.

Blood-Stained Badges In The Dirt

Michelle Rhee is a hated woman. She went into a system almost paralyzed under the weight of politics and pressures and stirred the genesis of a revolution.

I have no doubt that she made a lot of mistakes. Outwardly, she has all the warmth and compassion of a Transformer. In her and Adrian Fenty's amazing Wall Street Journal "Education Manifesto," Rhee admits she should have done a better job at communicating her goals, her hopes, her intentions, to the parties most invested and at risk under her fiefdom. Rhee might have failed to win them over no matter what, but she should have tried harder regardless.

What is already clear, however, and what cannot be reasonably denied, is that Michelle Rhee has forever changed the educational landscape in what has long been the worst educational district in this country. She is a modern-day Pale Rider or the Wyatt Earp of Tombstone, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ol’ Clint one day directs a movie about her.

Rhee (1) is brilliant; (2) was convicted about her responsibilities; and (3) was willing to put her career on the line. She walked into the saloon, a big ol’ 10-gallon hat shading her face, a steady hand on the butt of her trusty six-shooter, and politely told the drunkards she was the new sheriff in town.

Before she showed up, the numbers were in all ways horrifying. The numbers indicated the educational equivalent of a post-apocalyptic landscape of bandits, marauders, and hopeless helpless innocents hiding in their homes and eating scraps the mice left behind.

Today, the numbers are still horrifying. But noticeably and indubitably less horrifying than they used to be. It went from the Black Knight without arms and legs and bleeding to death to a Black Knight with one arm, more confidently asserting that “I’m getting bettah.” And Rhee is the catalyst for those improvements.

Michelle Rhee is an old school classic hero of the sort the 21st Century doesn’t accept and might not even want. She chose a thankless career.

Three years later, she is (temporarily) unemployed. Go to any story about Rhee on educationweek.com, and you will most certainly find dozens of teachers across the country – good, dedicated, intelligent people – writing about her as if she might well be the Antichrist. They question her motives. They question her “success.”

And good for them. She deserves scrutiny and skepticism. But in a decade, the educational history books will point to this moment and her role in it and say, “Rhee’s tenure in D.C. was the tipping point of what would become largest educational reform movement in over a century.”

Part II:

Take everything I just wrote about Michelle Rhee and education, and you can replace her with Barack Obama, and you can replace education with health care.

Thirty years from now, the way our government and our corporations handle health care will be drastically different from what it is today. It will be almost nothing like the plans Obama’s legislation intends for it to become.

Barack Obama was elected captain of the Titanic. When it comes to health care in this country, we’ve been aiming straight at an iceberg for 50 years. Almost every sane person in this idiotic country admits that the system is powerfully flawed and getting worse. A dude finally comes along and turns the steering wheel, and everyone screams at him.

They say the plan is flawed. Fine, and true.

But what they hate about Obama is that his solution isn’t their solution. Nevermind that they never had a solution until he forced them to make some shit up on the fly.

Thirty years from now, when health care in this country is drastically and measurably better than it is today – more affordable, no longer the responsibility of employers, and probably less tolerant of high-cost end-of-life treatments – we will look back at Obama’s health care law as the catalyst. They will say, “He got a lot of things wrong, but damn if he didn’t force the evolution to begin when no one else had the guts. And if he didn’t take that first step, we never get to where we are today.”

In reality, heroes don’t get everything right. In reality, heroes rarely get medals or adulation until after they’ve been martyred or marginalized. Real heroes are willing to risk more than the rest of us to achieve what everyone says they want but no one has the balls to do. Neither of these people did it alone, but they were the cornerstones of the effort, and their sense of conviction is what pulled many to their cause.

I don’t have to admire every detail of Rhee’s education reform to exalt her courage to spearhead it in the first place. I don’t like half of Obama’s health care legislation, but I absolutely glorify his risking a career’s worth of political capital to force change.

Rhee and Obama are currently facing the fate of heroes. They are being castigated, stoned, and despised by the very people they aim to help.

Such is the cost of heroism in the real world.

Kinky Sex Blog (Part Two)

Notorious - Loverboy (mp3)
Tied Down and Chained - BoDeans (mp3)

This is a continuation from Tuesday's Kinky Sex Blog (Part One)...

When Flying Tandem, Avoid Ropes: The David Jansen Story

Meanwhile, the story out of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, gets odder every day. The original story: an Atlanta woman was kidnapped by an acquaintance, taken to a cabin near Gatlinburg and allegedly raped. A pizza delivery man arrives (dude pictured at right), sees this woman bound on the couch as the man pays for pizza, and the woman mouths "Call 911!", and the rest is history. The latest, according to the dude's lawyer: The woman has filed multiple false accusations of rape in her past. She was a stripper. They were having relations. She asked him to abduct her, because it was a fantasy of hers. He has text messages and emails and surveillance footage to substantiate his story. A couple in the next cabin saw no indication of forced captivity, either.

Except around here, the only part most people know is the part where a crazy man kidnapped a woman and raped her. The follow-up stories all fall inside the paper and don't make the TV news.

The dude's name is David Jansen. His mug shot is available in print and on the web. He was married, and his wife has filed a restraining order and for divorce. Meanwhile, the woman in question remains under journalistic protection. It is newspaper policy; it is not a legal issue. If journalists so chose, they could reveal her name, but they won't so long as she remains a "victim."

First, I ask not that you pity this man. The man dillied where he shouldn't have dallied, and he did so with a woman whose chest was clearly more stable than her brains. Either is enough for plenty of folks to think he deserves to sit in jail for a while. The wackos would be fine if he was shot or had his tallywhacker lopped off, but I think most reasonable minds are just fine with the "you lie down with dogs, you get fleas" theory.

My frustration is not in his exposure per se, but by the injustice of our journalistic standards. This guy's face and name are all over. We even know he's a software engineer from Snellville. Basically, his life as he knows it is totally over even though it looks increasingly like charges will be dropped before he ever stands trial. Who really knows whether he'll manage to find another job? Who knows how much in legal fees this experience will cost him? Yet, did he commit any actual crimes? Did he do anything expressly illegal? Probably not.

This woman, on the other hand, has Glenn Close'd a man's life. She's accused people falsely before, to the point of being sentenced to psychiatric help. She looks to have been a willing participant in this particular game. Yet her name and her identity is protected because she's a "victim," because this man gave her money for cosmetic work, because he went along with her kinky tie-me-up wishes, and because ordering pizza during bondage fantasy role-play is apparently par for the S+M course. ("No anchovies! Noooooo, not the anchovies!!!" "Yess you bad boy, you're gonna eat allllll the anchovies!!")

I absolutely despise this rule of journalistic ethics: If you're arrested, your face and your name and your ass is fair game. Guilt matters not a lick. But if you're an accuser with a criminal history of falsely accusing, you're protected.

Basically, it's OK for our media outlets to rape someone accused of a crime and drag them through the streets like dead soldiers in Somalia. The best the accused can hope for is a fair trial and a forever-sullied name.

One of my relatives, whose life was admittedly a small-town soap opera already, was on the verge of filing child abuse charges against her ex-husband's new wife when she was arrested for sexually molesting a friend of her daughter's. The girl in question was the daughter of the best friends of her ex-husband and new wife.

Now, at the very least, all of that looks suspicious. Yet one name was revealed, and one picture was put in the papers, and all other names are protected by journalistic integrity. My relative has lost her job and every last penny. She's lost all visitation rights to her daughter and hasn't seen her in more than a year. She's only allowed to see her son once a week for a few hours under strict supervision. Her parents have lost their retirement and put down a second mortgage on their house.

Trust me when I say this: I really hope my relative is guilty. If she's guilty, then justice or something like it is being served, and all this misery and suffering is, in some sense, justifiable. But if she's innocent? If she never did these things? Sadly, I believe she is innocent, which means that the accusing family engaged in a very Abigail Williams small-town witch hunt revenge plot that has spiraled into something straight out of anyone's worst nightmares.

If you think people in small-town South are above involving their young child in a revenge plot against an ex-wife, then you really haven't lived down here very long.

But for now, this is our reality: if you're accused, you're fair game. You're bound and gagged and declared "probably guilty" in the public sphere, and by the time you've proven yourself innocent, no one cares.

If you're the highly suspect accuser with questionable motives or dubious explanations, you're protected. You're free to throw accusations behind a veil of privacy and protection like a caged monkey throwing shit at onlookers.

"Notorious" was actually written by Jon Bon Jovi, but apparently had too much synth and wacky voice machine for his own band (?). If both songs can't be found at iTunes and Amazon.com, mock those companies and demand they grow up and get some real music.

Pinch Me

I Want to Take You Higher - Sly + the Family Stone (mp3)
Pop Goes the Weasel - 3rd Bass (mp3)
Dare - Stan Bush (mp3)

Written mostly unedited, whilst intoxicated and celebrating late into the night...


Two things came to pass on Tuesday, November 4, 2008:

1. A person of color has assumed the highest position in our country.
2. The gross and stubborn hubris of the Republican Party was finally and fully acknowledged.

An entire race of people in America will wake up tomorrow with a slightly more positive view about life, about our country, about our world. Their tears are genuine, and their joy is pure. Voters like myself and millions like me get to celebrate with them. We didn't vote for a black man. We voted for a man we sincerely believed would take us and our country in a different, better direction. And we voted against a party -- not a man -- that valued power and the abuse thereof over principle and duty. Barack Obama has, over the course of more than a year, taken a very specific and consistent tack and sailed it. Some can call it smoke and mirrors, but it's the most consistent collection of smoke and mirrors you'll see in any candidate in recent history.

If the Democrats fuck up their chance in the next two or four years, if they overstep their bounds and do anything approaching what extremist conservatives tried so hard to tell everyone, you're damn straight voters will make them pay.

John McCain's concession speech was befitting someone who wanted so badly to be a "Maverick." He did that speech the right way. I even think it was sincere.

This election never had anything to do with John McCain. My conservative friends and relatives might not have been aware of it. Maybe they were too distracted by their accusations of a "liberal media elite." Maybe they pacified their beliefs with words like "socialism" and "terrorism" and "plumber." Sarah Palin may have made what could have been close into a blowout, but it wasn't about her, either.

The underrated Harrison Ford film "Presumed Innocent" has one of the great final lines of recent film history: "There was a crime. There was a victim. And there is punishment." That line is the story of the Republican Party in the 21st Century.

One day, when the Republican base is not so full of venomous spite and so purely in a "with us or against us" mantra, they might even realize that it wasn't McCain and Palin that lost. It was them. It was their vitriol and their lust to win without compromise or negotiation. Our country is about getting along, about working together. Conservative Christians and the ultra-rich don't want to work together. They want to make the rules, and they want everyone else to cower, to follow, to hide. Anything less than total dominance is considered failure.

Thank God they failed. I hope it takes them a couple of decades to realize how close to the sun they flew. I hope it takes them decades to realize that their Politics of the Immovable Object is pathetic, outdated, embarrassing and... well, un-American.

When Bush beat Kerry in what was percieved as a "mandate," Dubya earned 286 electoral votes. Barack Obama will fall just shy of Clinton's numbers in 1992, as electoral votes go. That bastard -- can I call him that?? -- rode two very close victories as if they were "mandates" for him to take a big ol' shit on the heads of anyone and everyone he and his cronies wanted. I guess conservatives slept well with it, because they didn't do much to stop it. They mostly cheered him on.
 
Well, your day of reckoning arrived on Tuesday night. You'd best eat that poop sandwich and digest it, because that's the only way you'll learn how terribly off-course you took yourselves and your country. We cannot, as a country, come together if you won't budge from your perch.
 

I hope you will. I hope you'll consider it. As I type this, I'm watching Barack and Joe Biden welcome their families. I'm looking at a First Familiy unlike any we've ever seen, unlike any most of us have ever allowed ourselves to imagine. I haven't cried tears of joy like this since I first saw Corey Haim's football team give him a standing ovation in Lucas. I can't imagine feeling a more powerful rush of optimism for my country, for our country, in a more dire time. The Obama family is enough to soften a lot of very crusty cynicism. The air is suddenly different.

Maybe some Americans will hope he fails. Maybe you're one of them. If so, I hope he proves you wrong. I hope he listens to your concerns, like he says he will. I believe he wants to be your President, too. And that belief only makes me cry harder.

And the less I hear the god-forsaken word "mandate" -- a word Dubya has forever tarnished -- the better off we'll be these next four years.

Who can limit themselves to just one, two, or three songs in such a triumphant and exhilerating moment?? "It Can Happen" by Yes, "Beautiful Day" by U2, "The Rising" by Bruce, and a whole flock of songs only slightly less cheesy than "Dare" (which comes from The Transformers soundtrack from the 1987 animated movie).